nobleness, gentle and tender as the spirit of its own chivalry, modulates every cadence.

Spenser's extraordinary faculty of vision-seeing and picturedrawing can fail to strike none of his readers; but he will not be adequately appreciated or enjoyed by those who regard verse either as a non-essential or as a very subordinate element of poetry. Such minds, however, must miss half the charm of all poetry. Not only all that is purely sensuous in poetry must escape them, but likewise all the pleasurable excitement that lies in the harmonious accordance of the musical expression with the informing idea or feeling, and in the additional force or brilliancy that in such inter-union is communicated by the one to the other. All beauty is dependent upon form: other things may often enter into the beautiful, but this is the one thing that can never be dispensed with; all other ingredients, as they must be contained by, so must be controlled by this; and the only thing that standing alone may constitute the beautiful is form or outline. Accordingly, whatever addresses itself to or is suited to gratify the imagination takes this character: it falls into more or less of regularity and measure. Mere passion is of all things the most unmeasured and irregular, naturally the most opposed of all things to form. But in that state it is also wholly unfitted for the purposes of art; before it can become imaginative in any artistic sense it must have put off its original merely volcanic character, and worn itself into something of measure and music. Thus all impassioned composition is essentially melodious, in a higher or lower degree; measured language is the appropriate and natural expression of passion or deep feeling operating artistically in writing or speech. The highest and most perfect kind of measured language is verse; and passion expressing itself in verse is what is properly called poetry. Take away the verse, and in most cases you take away half the poetry, sometimes much more. The verse, in truth, is only one of several things by the aid of which the passion seeks to give itself effective expression, or by which the thought is endowed with additional animation or beauty; nay, it is only one ingredient of the musical expression of the thought or passion. If the verse may be dispensed with, so likewise upon the same principle may every decoration of the sentiment or statement, everything else that would do more than convey the bare fact. Let the experiment be tried, and see how it will answer. Take a single instance. "Immediately through the obscurity a great number of flags were seen to be raised, all richly coloured:" out of these words, no doubt, the reader or hearer might, after some meditation,

1

extract the conception of a very imposing scene. But, although they intimate with sufficient exactness and distinctness the same literal fact, they are nevertheless the deadest prose compared with Milton's glorious words :

"All in a moment through the gloom were seen

Ten thousand banners rise into the air,
With orient colours waving."

And so it would happen in every other case in which true poetry was divested of its musical expression: a part, and it might be the greater part, of its life, beauty, and effect, would always be lost; and it would, in truth, cease to be what is distinctively called poetry or song, of which verse is as much one of the necessary constituents as passion or imagination itself. Those who dispute this will never be able to prove more than that their own enjoyment of the sensuous part of poetry, which is really that in which its peculiar character resides, is limited or feeble; which it may very well be in minds otherwise highly gifted, and even endowed with considerable imaginative power. The feeling of the merely beautiful, however, or of beauty unimpregnated by something of a moral spirit or meaning, is not likely in such minds to be very deep or strong. High art, therefore, is not their proper region, in any of its departments. In poetry they will probably not very greatly admire or enjoy either Spenser or Milton-and perhaps would prefer Paradise Lost in the prose version which Osborne the bookseller in the last century got a gentleman of Oxford to execute for the use of readers to whom the sense was rather obscured by the

verse.

Passing over several of the great passages towards the commencement of the poem-such as the description of Queen Lucifera and her Six Counsellors in the Fourth Canto of the First Book, that of the visit of the Witch Duessa to Hell in the Fifth, and that of the Cave of Despair in the Ninth-which are probably more familiarly known to the generality of readers, we will take as a specimen of the Fairy Queen the escape of the Enchanter Archimage from Bragadoccio and his man Trompart, and the introduction and description of Belphoebe, in the Third Canto of Book Second:

He stayed not for more bidding, but away

Was sudden vanished out of his sight:

The northern wind his wings did broad display

At his command, and reared him up light,

From off the earth to take bis airy flight.

They looked about, but nowhere could espy
Tract of his foot; then dead through great affright
They both nigh were, and each bade other fly;
Both fled at once, ne ever back returned eye;

Till that they come unto a forest green,

In which they shrowd themselves from causeless fear;
Yet fear them follows still, whereso they been;
Each trembling leaf and whistling wind they hear
As ghastly bug does greatly them afear;
Yet both do strive their fearfulness to feign.2
At last they heard a horn, that shrilled clear
Throughout the wood, that echoed again,

And made the forest ring, as it would rive in twain.
Eft through the thick they heard one rudely rush,
With noise whereof he from his lofty steed
Down fell to ground, and crept into a bush,
To hide his coward head from dying dreed;
But Trompart stoutly stayed, to taken heed

Of what might hap. Eftsoon there stepped foorth
A goodly lady clad in hunter's weed,

That seemed to be a woman of great worth,
And by her stately portance born of heavenly birth.

Her face so fair as flesh it seemed not,

But heavenly pourtrait of bright angels' hue,
Clear as the sky, withouten blame or blot,
Through goodly mixture of complexions due;
And in her cheeks the vermeil red did shew
Like roses in a bed of lillies shed,

The which ambrosial odours from them threw,
And gazers' sense with double pleasure fed,
Able to heal the sick, and to revive the dead.

In her fair eyes two living lamps did flame,
Kindled above at the heavenly Maker's light,
And darted fiery beams out of the same,
So passing persant and so wondrous bright
That quite bereaved the rash beholder's sight:
In them the blinded god his lustful fire

To kindle oft assayed, but had no might;

For with dread majesty and awful ire

She broke his wanton darts, and quenched base desire,

Her ivory forehead, full of bounty brave,

Like a broad table did itself dispread
For Love his lofty triumphs to engrave,
And write the battles of his great godhead:

¿Bugbear.

2 Conceal.

3 Soon.

4 Carriage.

All good and honour might therein be read,
For there their dwelling was; and, when she spake,
Sweet words like dropping honey she did shed,
And twixt the pearls and rubins1 softly brake

A silver sound, that heavenly music seemed to make.

Upon her eyelids many graces sate,
Under the shadow of her even brows,
Working belgardes2 and amorous retrate;3
And every one her with a grace endows,
And every one with meekness to her bows:
So glorious mirror of celestial grace,

1 Rubies.

And sovereign moniment of mortal vows,

How shall frail pen descrive her heavenly face,

For fear through want of skill her beauty to disgrace?

So fair, and thousand thousand times more fair,

She seemed, when she presented was to sight;
And was yclad, for heat of scorching air,

All in a silken camus lilly white,
Purfled upon with many a folded plight,
Which all above besprinkled was throughout
With golden aigulets, that glistened bright,
Like twinkling stars; and all the skirt about
Was hemmed with golden fringe.

Below her ham her weed did somewhat train;
And her straight legs most bravely were embailed1
In gilden" buskins of costly cordwain,12

All barred with golden bends, which were entailed's
With curious anticks,14 and full fair aumailed ;15
Before they fastened were under her knee

In a rich jewel, and therein entrailed 16

The ends of all the knots, that none might see
How they within their foldings close enwrapped be.

Like two fair marble pillars they were seen,
Which do the temple of the gods support,
Whom all the people deck with girlonds17 green,
And honour in their festival resort;

Those same with stately grace and princely port
She taught to tread, when she herself would grace;
But with the woody nymphs when she did sport,
Or when the flying libbard18 she did chase,

She could them nimbly move, and after fly apace.

5 Thin gown.

9 Hang.

Beautiful looks.

6 Gathered.

10 Enclosed.

13 Engraved, marked.

16 Interwoven.

And in her hand a sharp boar-spear she held,
And at her back a bow and quiver gay

Stuffed with steel-headed darts, wherewith she quelled
The salvage beasts in her victorious play,
Knit with a golden baldric, which forelay
Athwart her snowy breast, and did divide

Her dainty paps; which, like young fruit in May,
Now little, gan to swell, and, being tied,
Through her thin weed their places only signified.

Her yellow locks, crisped like golden wire,
About her shoulders weren loosely shed,
And, when the wind amongst them did inspire,
They waved like a penon wide dispread,
And low behind her back were scattered;
And, whether art it were or heedless hap,

As through the flowering forest rash she fled,

In her rude hairs sweet flowers themselves did lap,
And flourishing fresh leaves and blossoms did enwrap.

Such as Diana, by the sandy shore

Of swift Eurotas, or on Cynthus green,

Where all the nymphs have her unwares forlore,
Wandereth alone, with bow and arrows keen,
To seek her game; or as that famous queen
Of Amazons, whom Pyrrhus did destroy,
The day that first of Priam she was seen
Did show herself in great triumphant joy,
To succour the weak state of sad afflicted Troy.

OTHER ELIZABETHAN POETRY.

In the six or seven years from 1590 to 1596, what a world of wealth had thus been added to our poetry by Spenser alone! what a different thing from what it was before had the English language been made by his writings to natives, to foreigners, to all posterity! But England was now a land of song, and the busiest and most productive age of our poetical literature had fairly commenced. What are commonly called the minor poets of the Elizabethan age are to be counted by hundreds, and few of them are altogether without merit. If they have nothing

else, the least gifted of them have at least something of the freshness and airiness of that balmy morn, some tones caught from their greater contemporaries, some echoes of the spirit of music that then filled the universal air. For the most part the minor

1 Forsaken.